Kicking Back the Pebbles

If you are looking for a blogger who posts mouthwateringly delicious Greek recipes AND shares her thoughts on home-cleaning and organising tips, travelling, DIY and lots more then look no further than the multi-tasking wonder Athina Pantazatou.

A former executive secretary and now an EFL/ESOL teacher, Athina posts in both Greek and English on her popular blog Kicking Back the Pebbles where she serves up a range of ridiculously tasty meals and lots of useful information.

You can follow Athina and her blog on various social networking sites including:

I’ve been blogging since 2012 and every year this season I’d think about it. Well, ladies and gents, I guess it was about time!! Since I have a lot of photos on my hands and I want to give a number of details in both Greek and in English I thought it would be neater to share everything in two different posts… otherwise you might have had to scroll to infinity!

So lets get down to the details! Kourabiedes, pronounced [kou-rub-ye-thes], is a light sugar/butter cookie, fluffy but crispy on the outside and melt.in.your.mouth-crumbly on the inside. It is a traditional Christmas cookie but in some parts of Greece they’re also offered in weddings and christenings (since they’re sprinkled with powdered sugar, their white colour is associated to innocence & purity).

This recipe was passed down to my mother from her mother (my grandmother Chrysoula). It is hand-written with a blue-ink fountain pen (unknown by who –my grandmother couldn’t read or write so she must have dictated this to someone and then had it sent to my mom) and if you look really close, despite several spelling mistakes, you can distinguish the diacritics (accents) of the Greek polytonic orthography system above certain vowels. I had to laminate the piece of paper because it was falling apart but I so wanted to keep it!